Ossie Davis Tells Lehigh Poverty Is A National Sin

January 23, 1995|The Morning Call

The crisis facing America today is unemployment and the poverty that follows, 67-year-old Ossie Davis, performer/writer/activist, yesterday told 300 people paying tribute to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Lehigh University.

"We've got to have economic justice," said Davis, defining full employment as "a job at a living wage for everybody who wants to work." Davis says he believes the Constitution guarantees everybody a job who wants one.

Davis said "the powers that be" in America keep unemployment at 6 percent so that the county's "economy can be balanced" without inflation: "The powers that be say you need 6 percent unemployment to have full employment."

Davis said the consequences of unemployment are disease, drugs, crime and broken families.

He called poverty a greater sin than racism and predicted civil unrest if poverty is not ameliorated.

Davis, a resident of New Rochelle, N.Y., and husband of performer-writer Ruby Dee for 47 years, appeared in Packer Memorial Church as part of Lehigh's more than monthlong celebration of King's life and accomplishments.

Davis was born in Cogdell, Ga., and grew up in a ministerial household. He received the American Library Association's Coretta Scott King award for his play "Escape to Freedom," about the life of young Frederick Douglass.

Davis criticized late President Lyndon Johnson for beginning the War on Poverty and then squandering America's substance on the war in Vietnam.

King was planning a massive and lengthy march on Washington by poor blacks and whites when he was assassinated in 1968, Davis said. The goal was to pressure the government to solve unemployment.

Davis said he is a free man today, and that America still beckons to the people of the world as a place where they can define themselves through work rather than a caste system.